But many customers have asked us for more. We’re listening. You’re asking us for “off-line” data delivery. Today we’re proud to announce a new service available today to our customers: DataSift Carrier Pigeon Delivery.

For hundreds of years, the humble carrier pigeon provided a robust, reliable and scalable communication mechanism. Many of us still recall the excitement of receiving our first pigeon-gram wishing us perhaps a Happy Birthday or asking us to send more troops.

However, in the age of the Internet, the carrier pigeon has been neglected and dismissed as a modern means of message delivery. Despite the tip-of-the-hat that Twitter’s logo makes, avian-based communications is a market segment in dire need of innovation and transformation.

Inspired by workforce-crowdsourcing models like Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (https://www.mturk.com/mturk/welcome) and TaskRabbit (http://www.taskrabbit.com), we’re able to bring crowdsourced data delivery to DataSift’s platform, bringing the carrier pigeon into the 21st century and putting millions of feral pigeons to work for the Internet economy!

Here’s how it works:

By working closely with Transport for London and the London Mayor’s office, we’ve secured the exclusive access rights to the carrier pigeon population of London.

We’re converting carrier pigeons to iPigeons, by kitting them out with mobile RFID trackers, enabling us to track their location and report to you where your data is.